Let's Talk About Short Term Rentals - Again

 We've been here before discussing the impact of Short Term Rentals on North Bay Village.   

The current situation that the Village regulates short term rentals only to the extent that is allowed under state law.   

In 2011, Miami Beach, Surfside, and several other communities saw the handwriting on the wall and passed regulations before the state could preempt them.   

In North Bay Village, all the political air was taken up by a fight to install one Connie Leon-Kreps as mayor and the commission then sat on its hands until 2016.  For nearly 8 years, the commission accomplished nothing.  So when it caught the commission by surprise that they could no longer regulate short term rentals, they cobbled together a program and put in our code.   Here it is.  

Now we know that AirBnb et al are everywhere in the Village but to the shock and dismay of those North Bay Island residents cowering behind their apartheid wall it seems that the law also applies there.  And the same group are now screaming bloody murder.  

They probably should but it's a self inflicted wound.   

You see it's one thing to put a law on the books and another to enforce it.  As the regime of Crazy Eyes spiraled down further to its very evitable crash last year, the people who had been in charge of maintaining order in the program were all fired or pushed out.   At the same time, the shower of idiots known as the North Bay Village electorate stupidly and predictably passed an amendment to our charter to remove code enforcement from the police department thereby guaranteeing that no coordinated approach to the short term rental problem would be enforced.

The code enforcement change was because several members of the dais and their friends had been cited by the best code enforcement officer we've had since I've been here and that crowd did not like being told they had to follow the law one bit.   

So we're stuck.   We can't prohibit short term rentals.   We can and do require licensing.   

But it has to be enforced.   

And that needs to be done systematically.   It needs to be a full program that enforces the STVR , existing noise, parking, and nuisance ordinances.  It requires research in the Village administration to identify who is advertising, a program to report unlicensed efforts, a forward looking community engagement program to control the program.  

And none of that is going to happen here in Interim City.   

We need a permanent village manager, we need a permanent police chief, we need a permanent attorney, and we need permanent programs.   

North Bay Village wasn't destroyed in a day, it took Kreps a full 8 years and her acolytes are still trying to pull us down the drain.

 Rebuilding it won't happen overnight.   

In the meantime, if you need to rage somewhere, try calling your local North Bay Island Commissioner Jose Alvarez and ask him why he hasn't proposed a program of enforcement.   Telephone: (786) 999-3732.  I'm sure he'd be happy to speak to you.  

The rest of us just want the damn streets fixed.  

Kevin Vericker

April 25, 2019